Watch page WAS Re: [pmwiki-users] Mail Post Manual Trigger

Radu radu at monicsoft.net
Wed May 4 10:05:37 CDT 2005


Personally, I'd put the discussion and other sections on a separate page 
and leave in the PITS entry only the problem, which is to have a way to 
easily keep track of changes of interest in a wiki.

BTW, when efficiency detracts from usability (e.g. because pages render or 
save too slowly), efficiency DOES need to be considered. Otherwise we wind 
up with non-scalable code that's a waste of time to write and maintain. Of 
course, that's my opinion only.

My point in that pits entry was that emailing the changes gets messy in 
multiple ways. Recently I was thinking that if emailing needs to be 
involved, then only a summary of changes per day might be sent out (some 
sort of summary, but way smaller than a mailinglist digest), containing 
only links to pages which have changed (or a link to the watch page of the 
author), and only sent to authors who are interested on the specific 
modifications.

Since the script should be scalable we could implement a script that pmwiki 
would run once a day on the first 'read' call of the day (if access to the 
site crontab is not available). That script would compare yesterday's list 
of all pages in the site and their modification timestamps with the current 
timestamps, while caching current timestamps, and use a list of

group.page1:user1:email1,user2:email2,user3:email3

or some such (details of format TBD), to determine who gets an email and/or 
which watchlists need to change. Then it would write the new list of pages 
and modification timestamps. To simplify data entry, the email could be 
stored in a cookie at the client side. The maintenance of the page:email 
list would be done with a click-to-toggle-registration mechanism as 
described on
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00358
  under proposals. That file would be invisible to browsers, since access 
to the wiki.d directory is denied by .htaccess

New pages would be reported in the email only of the day they are created, 
and they would be added to all watchlists.


At 03:05 PM 4/30/2005, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>Neil Herber wrote:
>>Some of this thread is covered by PITS 358 "Track pages of interest". 
>>Should we add some of these more recent discussions to it (PITS 358 is 
>>quite long and rambling now) or should we start a new PITS "Individual 
>>Mail Post Notifications"?
>>The current email subject "Mail Post Manual Trigger" doesn't really 
>>describe the thread well.
>
>Hmm... I looked at that entry, and it seemed to be at a stage that's 
>incompatible with the mailinglist discussion.
>
>OTOH it really is all about the same issue, so I've started to rehash the 
>page.
>
>I haven't touched the discussion between Pm and Radu. I think it gets 
>things backwards, by letting efficiency issues guide the design process - 
>IMHO, the design should be guided by usability principles first, with 
>efficiency as a secondardy role. (Efficiency problems are easier to fix 
>than usability problems - if only because it's easier to diagnose 
>efficiency problems.)
>
>Regards,
>Jo

Cheers,
Radu
(www.monicsoft.net) 




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